Thursday, February 14, 2013

As a result of requests from the MODS community and for its own explorations into Linked Data, the Library of Congress has developed MODS/RDF, an ontology for MODS. This work has been informed by the previous work of developing a MADS/RDF ontology, which is in use now in id.loc.gov, LC's Linked Data Service, and by discussions in the MODS Editorial Committee. MODS/RDF may be used to create born-RDF MODS, or it may be used to create an RDF description corresponding to an existing MODS XML record. (An XSLT is available to help create MODS/RDF from MODS XML.)

Although it is still a draft and work in progress, LC would like to share its work on the ontology to encourage experimentation with MODS modeled as RDF. As the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative and its BIBFRAME data model is emerging, it is clear that much work is going into expressing bibliographic data as RDF. We will be working on a mapping of MODS to BIBFRAME as the BIBFRAME model stabilizes, and this initial work on MODS/RDF may inform that task.